The Micro Project

Thesis:  When the world is running down, it’s usually the dreamers that save us.

Logline: College dropout rescues a crew of world-class scientists trapped on a ship inside the human body.

Themes:
1.       Science - you CAN learn it!
-- Strictly entertainment, but also accurate to scientific and medical knowledge of today.
-- Can function as an adjunct to any biology, anatomy, physiology, physics or basic chemistry class.

2.       Society
-- Society marginalizes the dreamers, but should value them for their unconventional approach to problems.
-- A.D.H.D. is a priceless, ancient and advantageous thinking style, not a disability.
****Is treated today by mental health literature like homosexuality was regarded in the 1960’s (an “aberrancy”).
-- The book lays open the mind of a person with A.D.H.D.  Readers get to see and feel what it is like to think in this manner. They  get to “try on” what it’s like to think with A.D.H.D.  
****Readers learn the way those with A.D.H.D. learn best:  when absorbed in a task, forgetting that they are actually “learning” at all.

3.       Religion
-- The 4 initial crewmembers are of 4 racial heritages: Jewish, Arab, Armenian and Christian.  They represent the 4 quarters of the Old City of Jerusalem.
-- Jamie Brin regularly interacts with characters who can be interpreted as Father, Son, Holy Spirit and Satan.
-- The mythical estate – Westfalen – where the story takes place can represent heaven; some characters “die” and stay there forever, some return to the “real world.”
-- Jamie Brin experiences Grace (unearned favor), and ponders the interplay of free will versus pre-destination.

Synopsis:

If daydreaming ever became a professional sport, Jamie Brin would line up as many endorsements as Tiger Woods.  Heck, she’d probably end up with her own building on the Nike Corporate campus.  But since it isn’t, she dejectedly attempts to work as an auditor at an industrial chemical factory in Bakersfield, CA instead.

The 20-something college dropout – kicked out for cheating – spends most of her days at work trying to not get caught doing completely useless things, like sneaking around the plant complex, or searching for UFO’s.  It was, in fact, the computer algorithm she created to detect abductions that helped her identify the disappearances of numerous world-class scientists every year.  On further examination, she found that each missing person is in some way connected with the same man, Dr. David Asher, a very rich and well-known scientist living on an expansive estate in the foothills of Santa Barbara, CA.

Since she lives only a few hours away in Bakersfield, Jamie decides to use a week of vacation and visit Santa Barbara, hoping to meet this enigmatic professor.  Sleeping in her tiny Honda CVCC, she spends most of the time trying to sneak onto his estate – Westfalen – to ask him about the disappearances.  She finally manages a dramatic entrance, asks about the missing people, but is unceremoniously removed after being told that she is perfectly insane, and a flagrant trespasser. 

A few days after returning home, a giant old fax machine that came with her grimy apartment – one she didn’t even know was functional - suddenly begins spewing forth reams of what turn out to be journal entries depicting the training and then journey of 4 world-class scientists as they undergo “condention.”  The journals describe how the crew shrink to 1/126 their normal size, and explore the human body on a ship named The Jerusalem.  The journals contain detailed blueprints of the ship, and descriptions of how alchemy – an ancient art that is still secretly practiced with great power and secrecy today – is the driving force behind the “condention” process.

Through the journals, Jamie learns that an Air Force pilot, nicknamed Ace, will be “flying” the ship.  Ace is brash, powerfully-built, outspoken, good-looking, loud and confident.  He survived harrowing months in captivity during Operation Desert Storm after he attempted a daring rescue of his brother.  The pilot holds strong Christian beliefs and isn’t afraid to proclaim them.  He hates to lose, at anything. 

A young woman named Sadie Sumner monitors the dizzyingly-complex forces the ship encounters in the swirling environment of the human body.  A stunningly beautiful genius, only 17 years old, Sadie primarily advises the pilot regarding areas where the ship can move safely.  She was near to completing her 2nd PhD when recruited by the Micro Project.  She chose to undertake the dangerous and secret mission because her dark and violent essays coupled with a highly promiscuous lifestyle had led to suspicions by her high school counselor that she needed psychiatric care.  She is only too glad to disappear off the face of the earth.

A skinny, tense middle-aged and highly-offendable anatomist named Dr. Michael Levin (Ace calls him “Maps”) serves as the team’s navigator.  Successful in in the quiet confines of bench research, student complaints and accusations led to his ostracization and eventual dismissal from academic teaching.  A perfectionist, Dr. Levin has difficulty accepting error of any kind, especially in himself or when accused of it.  He is infatuated with Sadie; her wanton sexuality alternately attracts and disgusts him.  He agreed to the Micro Project mission almost entirely for the million dollar pay-out promised by the professor.

A medical doctor named Yusuf Muhammed, an immigrant from Palestine who grew up mostly in Los Angeles, serves as the communications chief and attends to any significant medical problems.  A natural peacemaker, the crew inadvertently look to him as their leader.  He routinely disappoints them in his efforts to avoid taking sides.  He can tell that Ace deeply distrusts him because of his racial heritage, which is frustrating and angering to him.  He believes he lost his faith in Islam long ago, largely because of his own ambivalence and increasing secularism.

The crew is rounded out by Jan, a longtime participant of the Micro Project who ostensibly serves as the ship janitor (hence another nickname from Ace), but actually functions more as their engineer, clearly having played a large role in the ship’s development. 

Jamie learns that the 3 goals of their maiden voyage are:

1.) To learn to pilot a man-made ship within the dramatic forces of the human body.
2.) To identify and remove a blood clot in Dr. Asher’s coronary arteries previously identified by catheterization.
And, 3.) To deposit the initial materials and supplies to begin building a permanent outpost in Dr. Asher’s body.

The crew encounter enormous difficulties during their first journey through the body.  With Yusuf and Levin incapacitated for different reasons, Ace almost single-handedly saves the ship, with the help of Sadie.  Despite her pervasive cynicism about intimacy, borne from years of abuse and promiscuity, Sadie finds herself genuinely impressed and surprisingly attracted to the heroic pilot.

Meanwhile, Jamie has fully embraced the story playing out in the journals, despite not knowing if they are real, or if “the professor” is in fact the man she recently harassed on his estate grounds.  Eventually invested in the outcome of the mission, Jamie discovers how to send messages back to the mysterious sender of the faxes.  More than once, she is fascinated to see that when she sends handwritten ideas back to the fax number, one of the crewmembers often describes ideas very similar to her own shortly thereafter.  Often, the team implements her ideas, usually to good effect. 

After their first successful “flight,” the Micro Project crew move to the second phase of their mission: attempting to identify a clot in the coronary arteries of the professor’s heart, which ultimately proves disastrous.  The ship accidentally knocks off a large plaque from a coronary wall, which then drifts further downstream, lodges in a small artery and causes a heart attack.

At Jamie’s chemical plant job, a gigantic explosion occurs just as she is reading about the heart attack.  Due to her knowledge of the plant’s layout – gained through numerous illicit explorations through the plant – Jamie manages to direct hundreds of employees away from what turns out to be a deadly and voracious chemical fire. 

One of Jamie’s few friends in life is Sarah, a co-worker and team leader who likes Jamie in spite of her incompetence…maybe because of such refreshing indifference to excellence.  Sarah is slightly overweight, but has fantastic fashion sense. After directing Sarah in how to herd the employees out of the building, Jamie plunges deeper into the smoke to rescue Larry, the boss she despises.  Just before she manages to escape the building, the blast from another explosion buries Jamie and Larry, now unconscious, in debris and office furniture.  The flames die down for a moment, allowing Sarah to step back into the building and drag out both Jamie and their boss.  Jamie ends up in the hospital in a coma; Sarah becomes a hero overnight – captured on live T.V. emerging from an exploding building, saving two co-workers wearing a fantastic pair of lipstick-red shoes.

When Jamie awakens in the hospital, she finds that the Journals are still mysteriously being supplied to her.  The crew has successfully drilled through the coronary clot, but found that their success was short-lived.  The oxygen-deprived cells downstream of the blockage, once re-exposed to blood, could not handle the new influx of oxygen and have released free-radicals – charged, destructive atomic particles – that bombard the ship, nearly pulverizing it.  The ship is constructed of a light metal lattice, covered outside and in by a computerized gel that responds to voice commands.  The gel is highly susceptible to charged ions like the oxygen radicals released by the suffocating heart tissue.  Thus, the decision to fly through the damaging storm rather than stay in the vessel is made under considerable stress and dissension among the crew.  They decide to fly through the storm, but once stationary again the entire crew is distrustful and angry with each other.  Furthermore, the ship is almost completely incapacitated. 

Once Jamie returns home from the hospital, she decides with certainty that the journals are real, that Dr. Asher is “the professor” of the Micro Project, and that she is in some way meant to be a part of it.  As she ponders just exactly what her role might be, it finally dawns on her that the journals are the Project’s method of secretly recruiting her.  Suddenly, she understands that all of the hundreds of men and women working at Westfalen on the Micro Project were recruited in a secret and unique way, including the current Jerusalem crew.  At the very instant of her realization, she runs to the window of her apartment and sees a waiting towncar underneath a cone of streetlight; she knows it waits for her.

The car indeed returns Jamie to Westfalen, Dr. Asher’s estate.  Her meeting with him initially goes terribly, as she is verbally-attacked by Dr. Asher’s primary assistant, Lucius.  He points out her endless list of failures in life, her terrible grades and cheating in school and her total unsuitability for involvement in such a secret and important mission.  Under the withering and humiliating attack, Jamie silently remembers her 7th grade teacher, Mrs. Ringley, who patiently tutored her in a unique method of learning.   Jamie learned to quiet her mind by focusing on her “Sacred Thought,” which allowed her to answer questions and recall facts with much greater success than ever before.  Her time with Mrs. Ringley remains Jamie’s most important experience of success and acceptance.  In fury and pain, Jamie clings to those memories in the face of Lucius’ tirade. 

The professor, weakened by the recent heart attack, becomes visibly angry.  He then attacks Lucius, as Jamie looks on with tears running slowly down her face.  Asher points out that all the years of his good grades and prestigious awards only served to make Lucius totally incapable of dreaming outside the norm, totally incapable of thinking up something like the Micro Project in the first place.  Doing it right, he points out, is different from thinking it up.   A verbal conflict ensues, culminating with the permanent dismissal of the assistant.  Lucius is incensed, reiterating that he has been appointed by The Guardian Council – the lethal and shadowy organization that guards the secrets of modern alchemy – to oversee Asher’s use of that power to shrink his crew and ship for the Micro Project.  In a rage, Lucius further promises that without his protection, the Council will destroy Asher in short order.  The old professor scoffs mirthfully. 

Later, Asher informs Jamie that he has chosen her to serve as captain of the Jerusalem.  She is initially stunned, but eventually agrees for no other reason except that when someone like Professor Asher asks something of you, you do it.  He informs her that she will only need a few days to get up to speed on the mission because she learned all she needed to know about the project inadvertently as she poured over the journals for the previous months. 

Eventually Jamie is united with the crew, via a one-person pod with a homing beacon that finds the incapacitated ship.  The crew are anxiously waiting for Jan to repair the ship or for someone from “Central” to help them.  When she arrives – disheveled, babbling – the crew are dismayed.  Given the dire circumstances, a garrulous college flunkee was not what they expected as their help.  Furthermore, they are furious that Jamie has been reading their journal entries about the journey – and their personal relationships – since before they left on the mission.  Sadie, especially, is livid at this betrayal of her trust. 

However, over time Jamie wins the loyalty of the crew.  Initially, she rarely troubles anyone, focusing instead on helping Jan repair the extensive damage caused by the free-radical storm in the heart.  Jamie begins to impress the crew with her knowledge of the ship and her clear love of it.  She is also so cheerful they can’t help but soften their stances toward her.  She is accepting of the budding relationship between Sadie and Ace, she is adept at showing Yusuf the kind of respect he is used to, and dreams up a way of employing Maps that makes him feel important.

Jamie finally calls a crew-wide meeting to plot their “escape” out of the body.  Everyone, miraculously, shows up.  In the middle of the meeting, the ship suddenly begins lurching wildly.  Eventually, the crew realize they are trapped in a macrophage, an immune cell that will soon destroy them with wicked efficiency.  Their frantic efforts to use the engines to fly out of the cell prove useless.  Soon the macrophage’s destructive chemicals begin pelting the ship, threatening to ruin everything Jan and Jamie worked so hard to restore.  Out of ideas, the crew look in desperation toward Jamie, hoping that the idiot might somehow come up with an idea that could save them. 

Brin then realizes then why the professor allowed her to be humiliated by Lucius.  The experience re-awakened her memories of her time with Mrs. Ringley and her Sacred Vision.  In the melee of the disintegrating ship, Jamie thus manages to tune everything out, just as she was instructed to by Mrs. Ringley so long ago.  She begins to actively interact with her Sacred Vision, a stone table with a splintered wooden chalice in the center.  Jamie eventually walks to the stone table and peers into the cup.  Inside, she sees a reflection in the blood-smooth liquid.  She sees the future of the Micro Project, with dozens of ships, outpost stations scattered around human bodies, and she is in some sort of command role.

Suddenly, in her almost trance-like state, she realizes that a macrophage would just kill itself if it didn’t have some form of protection from its own chemicals.  In her realization is the welcome fact that they don’t need to get the ship to the very distant cell wall of the macrophage, but only to the much closer wall of the phago-lysosome structure where the killing actually takes place.  Jamie can’t articulate any of this, but is able to convey enough of the information to Yusuf that he is able to realize the same thing.

Ace fires up the engines again as Yusuf directs him.  This time, the crew do not lose heart at the slow progress because they know that they have only a short distance to cover before they will escape the chemicals.  To their dismay, as they reach the wall they realize that they don’t have enough engine power to break through the wall.  Jamie has left the command deck and is strapped into a giant turret-gun located on one of the outer, flexible bumper-rings of The Jerusalem.  She commands Ace kill the turbines completely, even though it means the ship will be flung back into the cell center by the flexible wall.  Although counter-intuitive, Ace obeys the command, waiting for her plan to become clear.  As the cell wall recoils, sending the Jerusalem backward, Jamie screams at Ace to redline the engines again.  This time, she maneuvers the turret so that it is between the ship and the cell wall.  As the ship approaches the wall again, Jamie’s guns are blazing, pounding the wall with streams of sparkling energy.  The wall eventually gives way and they are free of the corrosive chemicals.

The Jerusalem is still strapped in the greater macrophage, however, and needs to escape from that too.  With some effort, the crew manages to cause the cell to initiate its own programmed death process, thereby freeing the ship completely.  Racing through the bloodstream, they find the exit portal in Professor Asher’s shoulder just ahead of a cloud of pursuing macrophages.  As they slam the port doors shut, Jamie is thrown bodily from her flight chair and loses consciousness.

Totally unclear about how much time has passed, Jamie awakens in her hospital bed, recalling a recuperation time at Westfalen and then one day being told that she would wake up the following day in real life.  Sure enough, Jamie awakens to find her friend Sarah waiting at her bedside, telling her how she was removed from her apartment due to a strange and highly contagious illness that she was suspected of having after being found there unconscious.  As Sarah prattles on, Jamie realizes that her entire adventure could have been nothing more than an elaborate dream.  She has no evidence that she ever left the hospital, returned to her apartment, or was picked up from there in the dead of night.  She realizes that she even left every page of the Project journals at Westfalen.  She is completely without proof that anything ever happened.

In the epilogue, Jamie sits in an interview for admission to a teacher training program for kids with special needs.  She matches the interviewing professor’s disdain for her with an equal disdain for his air of superiority.  It has been close to a year since she left Westfalen, and clearly the experience has helped her gain a sense of herself, and a goal for her life. 

As the interviewer talks, Jamie quits listening and recalls instead her final memories of her time at Westfalen.  Ace decides to discontinue the relationship that grew between him and Sadie because she has a sexual past that he doesn’t think he can deal with.  In her time with him, Sadie had convinced herself that she could manipulate and control Ace with her body and looks like she has with so many men, but in truth she realizes that he has captured her heart; that she genuinely loves him.  Thus, she is devastated when he calls it quits.  Despite his choice, Ace tells Jamie that unknown to Sadie, he chose to return to an Air Force base that is less that 20 minutes from the University where Sadie will be working.  Clearly, despite his intentions, Ace can’t let Sadie go.

Yusuf plans on returning to Al Quds University in Ramallah, Palestine to teach.  This is a return to his homeland that he has been avoiding for many years.  He invites Jamie to come there as his guest, and she agrees.  Maps is offered the position of dean of a new university for the Micro Project.  He accepts, choosing to never again leave Westfalen.

In the final scene, Jamie is brought back to attention in her interview.  The interviewer snorts his disdain and disapproval of the section of their degree program that trains teachers for special needs kids, specifically those with attention problems, noting that nobody ever wants to deal with kids who can’t learn and won’t sit still.  Jamie responds, with a flash of emotion, that she most certainly does want to deal with these children, that this is what she wants to do with her life.  She truly understands these children…she is one of them.